Plot
A power struggle ensues after the death of media magnate Amos Kyne, who turned his corporation over to his sole heir, foppish son Walter. Rather than run the company himself Walter decides to let the heads of its three divisions fight it out. Their assignment is to score an exclusive story on a serial killer terrorizing women in New York the Kyne organization's newspaper dubs "The Lipstick Killer." Whomever identifies him before the police will be rewarded the title of executive director.
One of the three, newspaper editor Jon Day Griffith, has an ally in high-profile Kyne reporter and television personality Edward Mobley. While wire-service chief Mark Loving recruits star writer Mildred Donner as eyes and ears, a third contender, Harry Kritzer, carries on a secret affair with Walter Kyne's wife Dorothy.
Mobley becomes engaged to Loving's secretary, Nancy Liggett. Receiving inside information from his police friend Lt. Kaufman, Mobley taunts the killer on TV using Nancy as bait.
In the end, the lives of Nancy and Dorothy, who live across the hall from one another, are placed in serious danger. While one of the three contenders for the executive director's job wins the contest, another has a surprise in store.
Read more about this topic: While The City Sleeps (1956 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)